J.A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of both the J. P. Beaumont series and the Joanna Brady Series. She has written 40 novels and she has more than 10 million copies of her books in print. Visit her Web site: JAJance.com.

Officer-involved Shooting

This will probably be your basic schizophrenic blog update. Two things to discuss and no way to bring them together.

First we’ll have the Bella update because those of you who have followed the last two blog updates will want to know what’s happening to our little stray.

This week and next week she’s hanging out at the Academy for Canine Behavior. When we found her, she was skin and bones–seven pounds when she should be nine or so. She was also a very picky eater. She’d take pieces of kibble out of her dish and leave them hither and yon. When we took her to the academy for an evaluation, Colleen McDaniel, the owner, offered her a tiny piece of kibble. Zero interest. Colleen said that dogs that aren’t food motivated are sometimes tough to train.

On Monday of this week Bella went to the doggy dentist where they pulled FOURTEEN TEETH!!! Fourteen teeth that were so badly decayed that they couldn’t be saved. (Twelve hundred dollars worth of doggy dentistry! Who says taking in a stray is cheap?) All of which tells us that she’d probably had no veterinary care for a LONG time. Years. Her trainer at the academy told me that usually when dogs come back from a full day of dentistry, all they want to do is sleep. Bella wanted to EAT!! Everything. Poor puppy. Her mouth must have hurt so much that she couldn’t eat properly.

Everyone, including the vet, says she’s the nicest dachshund they’ve ever encountered. And now that she smells better and is eating better, training is going better, too. She’s learned to come when she’s called. So far the biggest challenge is walking on a leash. I’m looking forward to a week from tomorrow when we’ll go to see what kind of miracles academy training has wrought.

I think Bella is going to be a great dog! And thank you to the people who read about Bella and are making arrangements to take their dogs to the Academy. It’s a great place for dogs!

Now to the other part of this blog.

This week I’m in Tucson where there have been two officer involved shootings this week, the third in the Greater Tucson area in a month. There have been several similar incidents in the news in Seattle of late. As a result of those shootings, several people–not the officers involved–are dead. These are people who, for one reason or another, didn’t put down their weapons when they were ordered to do so, or who fired on arriving officer.

It’s easy for those of us who were not directly involved to second-guess the cops involved and criticize their "excessive" use of force. I’m sorry, if I were a cop out on the street right now in the Seattle area, what happened to those four police officers in a Lakewood doughnut shop last year would never be far from the back of my mind, especially in those few seconds when it’s time to decide whether or not to pull the trigger.

Many of you know that I write mysteries. Most of my books are actually considered "police procedurals." In the mid-nineties, after trusting my head and imagination for a long time, I decided it was time to do some research. Bill and I signed up for the Bellevue Citizens Academy. I thought I could show up, sit in the back row, take notes, and then go about my business.

What I didn’t realize was that some of the officers teaching those classes were fans of my books. On the first night of class one of them plucked me out of the row, strapped a pistol loaded with blanks on my hip, and turned on a video of a shoot/don’t shoot scenario.

First a step back in time. During a period of time in 1970 when my first husband and I spent sixty days being stalked by a serial killer, I wore a loaded weapon every day. We lived far from town, far from any other neighbors, and miles from the nearest telephone. I was alone at our house for about forty of those sixty days, and I was determined to protect myself. I actually fired my weapon once . . . well, make that nine times. It was a .22 revolver and one morning I fired all nine shots out the window of my vehicle at a rapidly retreating rattlesnake. By the way, the snake was still laughing when he went up and over our rock wall and disappeared. Snakes, however, are notoriously hard to hit. I figured if the killer showed up, he would have presented a larger target.

It took me years to realize that by simply strapping on that gun I had already made a critical decision–I had made up my mind that if it came down to a place where it was either him or me, it was definitely going to be HIM!! It turns out that’s a decision countless police officers make each and every day when they put on their uniforms and weapons and go to work. Last year forty-eight law enforcement officers died in this country doing just that–their job. That’s forty-eight men and women who kissed their families goodbye, went off to work, and never came back.

So back to the citizen’s academy. The instructors took me up to the front of the class and turned on a video, explaining that at some point in the video I would need to make the decision to pull the trigger. The camera operated at the eye level or an officer arriving at a mini-mart. The clerk indicated that the bad guy was in a back room. The camera-arriving-officer goes to the door of the back room. Inside is a man standing on the far side of a store room. When the door opens, he grabs something–piece of iron, it turns out–and charged toward me with the club raised over his head. I fired my weapon. In the aftermath, it’s clear that in that particular circumstance, firing was the right thing to do–the only thing to do.

That experience brought home to me that in those kinds of situations–in real life situations–there are only split seconds for officers to make those life and death decisions–to make the call that it’s either him or me, and it had better be him.

So, yes, I understand the grief the families of those suspects feel when one of those situations has spiraled out of control and a loved one dies. Losing someone in that fashion causes a strange kind of amnesia. The mind tends to write over years of bad stuff. What remains are all those other memories, the good ones: the cute little kid who loved riding his Big Wheel; who sat on Santa’s lap and screamed for his first Christmas picture because he was scared to death; who proudly stuck his first lost tooth under his pillow in hopes the Tooth Fairy wouldn’t forget. The problem is, that cute little kid grew up and took paths that turned him into a dangerous adult–one who threatened himself and others, including the cop who gunned him down. Yes, the adult is dead, but the families are left mourning not only the man who is dead, but also their hopes and dreams of what he might have been; could have been; should have been.

But believe me, the dead person’s family aren’t the only folks left grieving in a situation like that. It’s also a life-changing experience for the police officers involved. Most of the people who go into law enforcement do so because they’re idealists and because they sincerely hope to make the world a better place. They don’t hop out of bed each morning and go to work thinking, "Hey, I wonder if I’ll get to shoot someone today." When the unthinkable happens, when they do have to pull the trigger, they live with the consequences of that action–official consequences and unofficial consequences–for the rest of their lives. And if they don’t make that decision in time, their families may have to live for the rest of their lives with the losses resulting from that momentary bit of indecision.

So the next time we hear about an officer involved shooting, before you or I jump in and say what should and shouldn’t have happened, let’s all take a step back. We weren’t there. Our lives weren’t on the line.

If you’re so inclined, say a prayer for all involved–the suspect and the suspect’s families and the police officers and their families. If you’re not a prayerful sort, just keep those folks in your thoughts for a while. Try walking a mile in their shoes. And remember, everyone who was out there was doing the very best they could under impossibly stressful circumstances.